In 1944 there were almost two thousand yellow-star houses in Budapest, but the Open Society Archive managed to open only a few more than a hundred for the Midsummer Day presentation. The rest remained closed. The page of the OSA publishes their full list, asking the readers to tell their stories.

I also want to contribute with one house from the almost two thousand. But even if you manage to get in and to record the stage, on which many generations played their stories, what does the stage tell us about these stories? I cannot publish but pictures, into which everyone can imagine a hundred years of history – or add to the post what you know about it.

“My mother still had an entire drawer of these letters. They purchased land from the 1880s on, piece by piece, as they could, they run farms on them. In the 50s, after the land was taken away, they even feared to keep the papers, even they could cause trouble. They put them on the fire, piece by piece. Only these few were left to me.”

2 comentarios:

I thought of this passage in "The Hare with Amber Eyes: A Hidden Inheritance", Edmund de Waal:

"They push Emmy and Viktor and Rudolf against the wall, and three of them heave the desk and send it crashing over the handrail until, with a sound of splintering wood and gilt and marquetry, it hits the stone flags of the courtyard below. This desk … takes a long time to fall. The sounds ricochet of the glass roof. The broken drawers scatter letters across the courtyard."